Vote! (Israeli edition)
Someone writing an article for the Israeli press about “people abroad who love Israel but might be worried” emailed me the following questions:
“1. What is something about Israel that you admire/appreciate over the years?
2. What are you worried the most about Israel these days?”
So I replied as follows:
“It’s hard to know where to start with either of your questions! But briefly:
Tiny Israel standing up for itself, against an often hostile and unjust world, is a huge part of what’s given me the self-confidence to stand up for myself in my own life. That was true even before I had visited Israel or spent significant time there, gazed across the desert at the still-clear ruins of the Roman siege of Masada, staggered overwhelmed out of Yad Vashem into the sunlight of Jerusalem, tasted the hummus or pomegranate juice or ice cream with blended fruit, befriended or had academic collaborations with dozens of Israelis, or married an Israeli woman.
My fear is merely the ‘obvious’ one — that, in response to the staggering hostility directed against the ‘Jew among the nations,’ Israel will become more and more belligerent, isolated, and right-wing. It will get demographically overwhelmed by those who don’t want to work or serve in the army, while hundreds of thousands of secular educated Israelis leave. It will be internally divided almost to the point of civil war. It will repudiate the liberal-democratic vision of Herzl and Ben-Gurion, of world-class universities and making the deserts bloom, for the swaggering, theocratic vision of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, of chasing Palestinians from their olive groves. It will become more and more like the hateful caricature of itself that the anti-Israel people in the West always imagined. And then, having been internally weakened in all of these ways, it will finally be destroyed by its external enemies, who will never have rested the whole time, who never once wavered in their dream of a second Holocaust.
I hope and pray that in the upcoming election, the Israeli voters make optimistic choices that repudiate these fears.”
As I’ll do more and more with political posts, I’m leaving the comments off. Why? Because my remaining life is too short to spend it battling an endless parade of trolls and griefers, leftists and rightists and just nihilists, who might or might not be AI.
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